Yeah, this one’s set in Norway, where they allegedly listen to scientists.
Magnet has picked this one up for US distribution. No firm date for release for “The Quake” that I can see,
The reason it’s notable is its connection to the very fine Norske tsunami thriller, “The Wave,” same stars, same general idea of a natural disaster that has avoidable consquences.
There’s an embargo on this film, a review that won’t see the light of day until All Hallow’s Eve.
Disney landed Keira Knightley, and Keira 2.0, aka young Mackenzie Foy, along with Helen Mirren and Morgan Freeman.
It opens Thursday night, and one wonders if Disney’s fondness for making the most of “brands” isn’t about to blow up on them.
I mean, “The Nutcracker” ballet is something a tiny percentage of kids find enchanting, and the rest of us were dragged to it, endured the evening of blatantly symbolic dance (You still have to tell tiny tots the story”) or saw a version on TV and didn’t warm to it.
No, it’s not the ballet, but the branding in this case could be a “Oh NO Mommy” turn off for a lot of viewers.
It could do well, but one has a nagging feeling the weekend belongs to Freddie Mercury and families may not be up to a true “holiday” kids’ fantasy quite just yet.
Long before the Coen Brothers saddled up with “True Grit,” they showed a penchant for florid, archaic English, the speech of the characters of Western writer Charles Portis.
Think of “Raising Arizona” — “Edwina’s insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”
“O Brother, Where Are Thou?” — “It’s a fool that looks for logic in the chambers of the human heart.
Not everybody prattles on through “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” the Coens’ new film for Annapurna and Netflix. One chatterbox trapper (Chelcie Ross) gets labeled “tedious” for running on and on at the mouth because he so seldom has the pleasure of a human audience.
Then there’s the title character, played in the opening scenes by Tim Blake Nelson, showing off his crooning pipes in a way that “O Brother” only rarely allowed.
“I too have been known to violate the statutes,” his Buster offers a crusty barkeep who allows that whiskey is illegal in this corner of the desert Southwest. The shootout that follows, an under-estimated Chatty Cathy of a dandy, in cowboy clothes straight out of a Roy Rogers faux Western, dispatching several tough hombres and never losing his grin, can only be punctuated thusly.
“Puts me in mind of a sawwwwwng.”
And that opening — snippets of grandiloquent goofiness, graphic violence and the occasional song, is your test. No, it’s not a musical. But will you want to sit through two hours and twelve minutes of unconnected episodes, chapters from a (fake) titled “The Ballad of Buster Suggs,” or are you of a mind to spend your time more industriously, the importance of being earnest taken into account?
Because while every single chapter — “The Mortal Remains,” “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” etc. — has delights and reasons to enjoy it, they don’t tie together. It peaks early, and slogs a bit afterwards as we get the usual Coen grotesques, darker-than-dark humor, verbal dexterity that ventures into verbosity and their special brand of cruelty.
Every so often with this film, premiering Nov. 16, makes one wonder “OK, when do they end this? And how?” It doesn’t so much run its course as stroll it, petering out along the way.
We meet a solitary prospector (Tom Waits) looking for gold in pristine (until he shows up) wilderness, an armless/legless traveling orator, “The Wingless Thrush” (Harry Melling) performing at the behest of a hustler/manager/barker played by Liam Neeson.
A bank robber (James Franco) has a knack for dodging nooses, once when an Indian war party crashes his necktie party.
An unworldly young woman (Zoe Kazan) is tested by a wagon train West, not least by her affection for her brother’s dangerously/irksomely noisy Jack Russell terrier.
And a couple of swells from the British Isles (Brendan Gleeson and Jonjo O’Neill) regale and are regaled by their fellow stagecoach passengers (Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek and that tedious trapper) as they transport a body overland to Fort Morgan.
It’s not a musical, in spite of that adorably bubbly and then bullet-strewn opening, but no less than Neeson and Gleason add tunes to the proceedings. Waits? Of course.
The songs are variations of the saloon tunes of a hundred Westerns, most amusingly Nelson’s Buster re-wording the classic “Little Joe” from “Destry Rides Again” to suit the situation.
Nelson is the stand-out performer here, with players like Neeson and Gleason and Franco feeling a tad wasted in parts this small. Waits sparkles, and the Coens make great use of Rubinek, who slings a French accent as he pontificates on the nature of love and what’s deep within the human heart and such.
“Buster Scruggs” is as rich in detail as any of the better Westerns we’ve seen in recent years, from “Unforgiven” and “Deadwood” to “Open Range” and “The Homesman.”
The wagon that transports trapped Professor Harrison, “the Wingless Thrush,” is a classic theater on wheels, and his repertoire, ranging from Shelley’s “Ozymandias” to Lincoln’s “Gettsyburg Address,” Shakespeare to the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution, is exactly what traveling “orators” who weren’t Mark Twain would recite to the miners and cattle town provincials such performers regaled.
Indian warpaint is vivid and Remington painting real, prospecting is laid out in all its labor intensive tedium and peremptory hangings weren’t foolproof when all they had to work with was a horse, a tree, a rope and a prisoner.
The Coens manage a few Cinemascope-worthy Western vistas; Buster singing through buttes and canyons, an Indian attack that begins on the cusp of the horizon and a genuine wagon train — all images with beauty and scale that “True Grit” lacked.
Whatever working for Netflix did for their budgeting, not having to edit “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” into anything tighter or more thematically coherent allowed them these little grace notes.
But I found “Buster” to be a film that danced out of the starting gate and trotted or gamboled along, pleasantly and/or grimly ever after — perfectly watchable, probably more watchable in segments in the “Let’s put this on pause” comfort of your own home.
MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence
Cast: Tim Blake Nelson, James Franco, Liam Neeson, Brendan Gleeson, Tom Waits, Zoe Kazan, Tyne Daly, Saul Rubinek
Credits:Written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen. A Netflix/Annapurna release.
Running time: 2:12
The casual fan probably doesn’t notice that roughly the output of the Joel and Ethan Coen Filmworks ltd. is either a misfire or utterly unwatchable.
Great films, Oscar winners, mixed in with “A Serious Man” and “Hudsucker Proxy” and “Burn After Reading” and a pleasantly inferior remake of “True Grit.”
They spent Netflix cash on going back to the Old West, filming a movie that will go a long way toward deciding if James Franco earns a “Get out of #MeToo” card, or faces years in the movie wilderness and movies with the likes of Mel Gibson and Louis CK.
Netflix is starting to screen their movies for critics in theaters, which is a good thing, although trying to get a publicist there to get you access to a specific release (Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind,” finally) is a lost cause. There’s little rhyme or reason to what they promote. “Awards contenders?” Maybe.
“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs” premieres on Netflix Nov. 16.
It’s a January release, so expectations are low.
The money in this trailer seems to have gone for music clearances and a digital mountain lion.
Bryce Dallas Howard voices Bella, the lost dog, with Ashley Judd, Wes Studi and Edward JAmes Olmos the only real “names” in the cast.
But the author of “A Dog’s Purpose” strikes again with “A Dog’s Way Home.”
To Nic Cage fans — and we know who we are even if we’re proud of it — every movie is worth a “Nic Cage is BACK” headline. You know, like 50 years of Rolling Stone/Dylan covers.
Like a lot of Cage C-movies these past few years, this one has him looking scruffy, burnt out and wearing cowboy boots and a drawl.
Franka Potente is the other pretty face you recognize in “Between Worlds,”
which played Fantastic Fest and doesn’t have a firm release date yet.
Melissa McCarthy unleashes her inner misanthrope in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and we may never look at her the same way again.
Sure, the sad, lonely and foul-mouthed persona she’s cultivated in a few too many films is a big part of her version of the forger, thief and writer Lee Israel. But anger at her world, the limits put on it by Israel’s disdain for the human race, career misdirection, alcohol consumption, limited talent and frumpy appearance carries McCarthy through this performance, justifiably earning her Oscar buzz.
Israel was a biographer-for-hire in the ’70s and 80s, a freelance writer who got a book on reporter and game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen on the best seller lists, but whose Estee Lauder bio was abandoned by book sellers practically before publication.
In 1991, when we meet her, she’s drinking at work, copy-editing with kids half her age and cursing too freely to keep the job. Her cat is old and sick, she’s behind on the rent. Her agent (Jane Curtin, prim and perfect) rarely returns her calls and nobody but nobody is interested in her writing about the nearly-forgotten vaudevillian Fanny Brice, already the subject of “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady” movies by Barbra Streisand.
She can’t make nice, flatter, kiss up or “play the author’s game” to reach success. All she can do is remind us all of how there is nothing more distressing than the impatient hum of an electric typewriter when you’re at your written wit’s end.
“I’m a 51 year-old woman who likes cats better than people,” she grouses. She’s living in near squalor in one of the most expensive cities on Earth with no ready means of support.
Meeting a fellow barfly (Richard E. Grant, the life of the party), a gay ne’er-do-well who has crossed paths with her at this or that publishing party, doesn’t help. Drunk or sober, she’s broke. She has to sell her personal letter from Katharine Hepburn (she profiled her for a magazine in the ’60s) just to get her cat cared for.
She knows letters from the rich and famous have value. Stumbling across a couple of Fanny Brice letters, typewritten and tucked into some Brice books she pores over in the New York Public Library, gives Israel the inspiration.
As we’ve seen her pilfer from her agent’s apartment at a party, the leap isn’t a great one. Lee Israel will turn her writing toward mimicking the letters of figures she can research, whose voices she can copy, selling witty, jokey and blushingly personal notes for hard cash.
Brice, Noel Coward or Dorothy Parker, no problem. And when she gets away with it once or twice, she invests in the process — tracing signatures, reproducing personalized stationery, buying every old typewriter she can find, matching each typewriter to the author she is impersonating.
You had to be clever like that in 1991, even if you didn’t yet have the Internet around to unmask your crimes.
Israel could be funny and biting, so she made bon mot queen Dorothy Parker (“What fresh hell is this?”) a specialty.
“I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker!”
If there’s guilt, maybe it’s because she took advantage of book-seller/letter buyer who is also a fan (Dolly Wells) and kind of cute. Rooking Stephen Spinella and Ben Falcone, playing other dealers, is guilt-free.
There’s a touch of McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation in Israel — perpetually irked at the world when really, she’s the one with the big problem. It’s an understated performance flatteringly framed in close-ups by director Marielle Heller. Co-writer Nicole Holofcener (“Friends With Money,” “Lovely and Amazing”) specializes in layered, empathetic roles for women, which had to help.
Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is based on Israel’s memoir, one of those reminders that in New York publishing, a name’s a name and when you’re in you’re in. Whatever price she paid for her crimes wasn’t high, and there were plenty of suckers who believed her later book and never bothered to fact-check her earlier works.
Short cutting cheats are repeat offenders, and I’d take anything she signed her name to with a bunch of grains of salt.
But “Forgive Me” makes for a fun yarn, one undercut with tinge of sadness. Perhaps only a comic as funny and salty as McCarthy could have made Israel funny, cunning, crooked and dysfunctionally depressed, so likably unlikable in the process.
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and brief drug use
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Dolly Wells
Credits:Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:46
“Hunter Killer” arrives in theaters as a Cold War revival submarine thriller about commandos and a US sub sent to rescue an embattled, coup-imprisoned Russian president.
Tell me you think that’s wonderful geopolitical timing. Take off your MAGA hat when you do, pal.
It was scripted a long time ago and filmed some time before Michael Nyvist (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) died, in June of 2017. But this disjointed actioner feels like the most unfortunate piece of pop art timing since Charles Lindbergh tried to get “Save the Next Dance for Me, Adolf” on the 1941 “Hit Parade.”
It’s a Gerard Butler combat pic, and while it isn’t on the level of his worst B-pics — Gary Oldman has won an Oscar since this was put in the can, and the effects are decent — it’s still a clumsy thriller weighed down by cliches, gigantic leaps of logic and ham-fisted “The Russians are Just Like Us” politics that only a tiny minority of Americans won’t find grating.
Butler is Captain Glass of the U.S.S. Arkansas. He’s on a rescue mission for a missing U.S. sub in the waters north of the Once and Future Soviet Empire. But once he’s on station, there’s “a shoot out under the ice.” His “Hunter Killer” (non ballistic missile) sub has to fight its way out of a jam. The Russians want World War III?
So it almost seems. Because their president (Alexander Diachenko, handsome and bland) has been taken hostage, labeled “weak” by his bellicose defense minister (Michael Gor).
The Navy brass (Common) and intelligence expert (Linda Cardellini) see what’s happening. They’ve got to prevent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Oldman) from pressing Madame President (Talk about alternate reality.) from escalating things into a war.
And as they already have commandos on the ground and a sub within reach, why not rescue the Russian Not Named Putin?
“We’re goin’ in t’get four of our boys, and one Russian president,” Captain Glass growls.
Toby Stephens of Netflix’s “Lost in Space” is the tough-as-nails commando leader, Carter MacIntyre the sub’s highly-strung XO (executive officer), the one who shrieks at his commander every time Glass goes rogue, beyond orders, what have you.
And the late Nyqvist, who rarely had a Hollywood film worthy of his talent and stature in his native Sweden, is a Russian sub commander.
The digital sub-fights are quite good, with surface ships and some apparent Navy cooperation. The best moments in the movie are little slices of damage control response teams, stanching flooding, putting out fires, etc.
The commando scenes, which are like their own movie (with painfully under-developed characters, “types” really) are generic paint-by-number bits. Love the way they swim in fjords above the Arctic Circle as if it’s Fleet Week in Key West.
It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies. It’s “Red October Lite,” with lots of Tom Clancy gadgetry and Cold War politics that Clancy would recognize as well.
Even though Helsinki makes the idea of an American rescue of a Russian president more plausible than a say, having a woman in the White House, “Hunter Killer” isn’t remotely good enough to make you forget the America it’s being released in, which is the whole point of an action movie — escape.
MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language
Cast: Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini, Michael Nyqvist
Credits:Directed by Donovan Marsh, script by Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss, based on a novel by Don Keith and George Wallace. A Summit release.
Running time: 2:02
There comes a moment in many a thriller when the villain, caught redheaded and/or redhanded, says the following.
“It’s not what you think. I can explain everything.”
In “Silencio,” both those statements are a lie. We’ve thought out and figured out the big surprise 45 minutes ago. And no amount of explaining would fix the obvious.
A sci-fi/ghost story mashup, it’s got nonsensical science, unemotional actors and direction that can’t be called that in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s head-slappingly stupid, a waste of time and scenery and an embarrassment to all concerned.
The “inspired by true events” story was inspired by an alleged radio/cell-phone dead zone in the central Mexican desert, a “zone of silence” corresponding with the landing place of the Allende meteorite (1969), “the most studied meteorite in history,” according to Wikipedia.
A U.S. missile accidentally crashed there, in the Mapimí Silent Zone in 1970, when our fictional story begins. The team investigating the crash is led by Dr. White (veteran Australian character actor John Noble of TV’s “Legends of Tomorrow” and “Elementary”).
The cobalt in the middle gets mixed up with the metal from the meteorite, and next think you know, the scientist and his associate are transported to another part of the desert, just in time to interfere in the car crash that killed Dr. White’s son, daughter in law and grandchildren.
His granddaughter Ana survives in this version of events, raised by Grandpa, who lives with her after she grows up to become a psychiatrist in something like modern day Mexico.
I say “something like,” because you and I can do the math. Melina Matthews of “Megan Leavey” plays adult Ana. She’d have to be in her mid-50s, and looks not a day over 40, with a little boy who could not be over four.
Grandpa has dementia, but by coincidence Ana is treating a clairvoyant who sees ghosts. His name is Daniel (Michel Chauvet), and he warns Ana, Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost” style. “You’re in danger” girl. As we’ve seen that the only other person to have touched the contaminated stone from the crash site was a tiny boy named Daniel 48 years ago, we take him seriously.
Ana? She throws her education, child of science background out the window and swallows his tale whole. She’s to repeat numbers to her grandfather which will end his dementia, if only briefly. He has to track down the magical stone from way back when in a matter of hours.
Because other people are looking for it, too.
Rupert Graves, playing Dr. White’s former assistant now sentenced to a life of giving half-finished lectures on the “science” of the “zone of silence,” sums up the mystery and the movie he cashed a check for in a single sentence.
“We’ve never made sense of it.”
Writer-director Lorena Villareal hasn’t made a second film since her 2004 debut “Las Lloronas,” a version of a famous Mexican ghost story about “The Weeping Woman.” Coincidentally, there’s another movie about “La Llorona” coming out shortly.
As for this one, 14 years after Villareal’s first, you’d think she’d have mastered the art of creating suspense, pressed upon her actors the need to grieve when a character’s loved one dies, learned where to edit (the takes seem to start just before “action” and end just after “cut”).
It’s entirely too much to expect her to do the math (The movie could be set a few years ago, judging from some of the cars and the cell phone), or learn the difference between a tortoise and a turtle. She made her characters scientists and doctors, after all.
Yeah, it’s that incompetent.
MPAA Rating: R for some violence
Cast: Melina Matthews, John Noble, Rupert Graves
Credits: Written and directed by Lorena Villarreal. A Tulip Pictures release.
Running time: 1:38
The people in the artists’ collective known as Meow Wolf, and the filmmakers charged with making “Meow Wolf” Origin Story” and for that matter anyone writing about or reporting on them, run head-on into the same semantic dilemma. How do you describe the nearly indescribable?
They’re something like 200 in number — visual artists, video artists, conceptual artists, even performance artists, and the installations they mount are immersive, psychedelic, experiential, a riot of color, interactivity, movement, tactile (Touch me, please.) and sound.
It’s like Burning Man — the Permanent Fringe Festival Experience, as scripted by George R.R. Martin and installed in the most dazzling Children’s Museum you’ve ever visited.
These days, they have a permanent, profitable “high tech amusement park for people who don’t think Disney is nearly weird enough,” experience in Sante Fe, New Mexico, where they were founded. They have traveling exhibits and are franchising into other cities — the Cirque du Soleil of art.
But in the beginning, as any “origin story” promises, they were just young, idealistic somewhat anarchic Sante Fe artists “on the outside looking in” with unlimited imaginations, no backing, no reputation and little chance at cracking “the third largest art market in the United States.”
Emily Montoya, Benji Geary, Vince Kudlabek, Caity Kennedy, Matt King, Benji Geary and Sean Di Ianni were among those who found themselves struggling artists, trapped in a tourist town of 70,000, with almost as many art galleries (300, actually), none of which they could get their work into.
With no room for avante garde, experimental or genre-bending art, they commiserated and partied and made their own fun and noise. Then one day, Sante Fe native Vince Kudlabek, hoping to “agitate” and “shake up the culture I was born and raised in,” hot on the idea of a bunch of them renting a space, creating their own art and making a splash that day.
“We can’t wait for others to invite us to be part of THEIR world. It’s time for us to DO.”
What began with ten or so artists collecting garbage and turning it into this 900 square foot space of dazzling color, form, lights and noise grew, over the course of a decade, into an outfit that could sell out shows in huge warehouses, and eventually take over a closed bowling alley for a permanent exhibition that is the “theme park” Uproxx described above.
That the alley was purchased and rented back to them by Sante Fe’s “Game of Thrones” tycoon George R.R. Martin just made their big splash that much bigger.
We get a taste of the “herding cats” nature of mounting shows by the ever-growing group, an experiment in near anarchy where the organized and driven (principally Kudlabek, Montoya and Geary) forever butt heads with the vast majority, who are too “punk” to sell out. The art form? “Maximalism” is one way to describe it.
“Maximalism is way more stuff than you’d think would be comfortable” in a single space, in a single exhibit.
Their shows — GeoDecadent, The Due Return (a giant maze of a wooden ship, complete with pieces to read or play with, and bunks for naps mid-visit) and Omega Mart, a wholly self-contained “store” of colorful, conceptual weird objects — “Special today on Whale Song…” — culminate in the vast permanent bowling alley makeover.
There, you “open the door into another world, an interdimensional travel agency” via a Queen Anne home called “The House of Eternal Return,” which has passageways that take one to alternate dimensions, realities in time and space, fancifully realized with video, neon, plush this or collage that.
“Origin Story” lets us see them morph from artists or “ideas” people into Imagineers who don’t work for Disney, “creating a hyper event horizon.”
The writer Martin recalls the pitch for him to buy that bowling alley, with phrases like “interdimensional” and “different space and time pushing my buttons, being a sci-fi/fantasy guy.” Buttons pushed, he was all in.
The film tracks the group from “zygote” to full-blown success, from the days when “the cops thought we were a cult” to internal squabbles over who gets credit for what,” from throwing together stuff in the name of art to dealing with “being up to Code” and having to hire electrical contractors to keep them from burning their patrons to death with one flight of fancy too many.
Two big themes run through “Meow Wolf: Origin Story.” One is “inclusivity.” Even people who get into tiffs and storm off find themselves invited back in, “a lot more like a family than friends,” Caity Kennedy says. The other is uncompromising idealism.
That’s the most impressive thing about Meow Wolf — all this money changing hands, all this work donated, created collectively, all these clashing agendas and egos, and they’re still sharing, still pitching in to help others realize their visions, looking to new cities and more “outsiders looking in” artists to replicate their own level of success.
Whatever rough edges were shaved off their group persona for the film (and we hear about conflict but never see it), whatever you think of the eye candy they’re creating, that’s inspiring to see.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: George R.R. Martin, Emily Montoya, Benji Geary, Vince Kudlabek, Caity Kennedy
Credits: Directed by Morgan Capps, Jilann Spitzmiller . A Meow Wokf release.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 